Tag: earth history

Possible Source Of Periodic Extinctions Over The Past 250 Million Years

Summary

Fossil records show that periodic mass extinctions occurred on Earth every 26M(million) years, which could be caused by a large orbiting celestial body.

This body could be located in a region where the influence of other stars would be insignificant allowing the body’s orbit to be stable, with a periodicity of 26M Years.

The celestial body could enter our Solar System and perturb the orbits of small and large asteroids from the Asteroid Belt and other regions, allowing some of these displaced asteroids to enter the Earth’s orbit, causing impacts and mass extinctions.